Working Children

Jane Humphries's new book analyses the role played by child labour in British industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a theme that has contemporary resonance. Today child labour is central to the economies of many developing nations. Recent estimates suggest that remunerative work is a reality of life for around 150 million children aged between five and fourteen years. On average this means that just under one in six children in that age range in the developing world works, although this statistic masks some significant regional differences: in Sub-Saharan Africa the figure increases to around one in four children (up to the age of seventeen) but in Latin America it is around one in ten.¹

Child labour is a catch-all term that encompasses a wide range of work. At the extreme end of the spectrum are children conscripted into military service, and those forced into forms of slave or bond labour centred on sexual exploitation, drug trafficking and organized begging. Typically however the majority of children toil in agriculture, mining, domestic work, manufacturing and the service industries. The western world is key to this. The demand from international markets to source cheaply produced goods for western consumers is now a familiar tale in the UK, with several high-street stores recently exposed as selling goods produced by child workers abroad. In 2008 Primark, purveyors of cheap, disposable ready-made fashion, sacked three of its suppliers after an investigation revealed they had been subcontracting work out to children in southern Indian refugee camps. Similarly, Gap was forced to remove contractors and reiterate its commitment to 'ethical policy' after one of its Indian suppliers was found to be using child labour in Delhi sweatshops. However, policies that ban goods made by child labour do not address the other side of the equation - the need for the income that children earn in desperately poor families. Indeed while the conscience of the western shopper may be salved, such actions may actually do more harm than good.

This dependence of poor families on child earnings was true also of Britain during the industrial revolution. Child labour was often essential to family survival. But how can the historian accurately document this labour? The sources are notoriously patchy. The first census to provide reliable information on occupational designations was in 1851, but this was at the end of the classic industrial revolution period. Moreover, as census data collection took place on one specified day of the year (usually in the spring) it did not capture a large amount of seasonal child employment - in agriculture for example. It is also likely that child labour went under-recorded in an attempt to evade the prying eyes of the state.

Government enquiries, particularly the great Royal Commissions of the 1830s and 1840s which focused mainly on the textile and mining industries, have been studied closely for data on child labour. Child witnesses were often questioned by the commissioners, and their testimony revealed the physical damage done to children by working at an early age. Elizabeth Bentley, who had begun work in the card room of a flax factory at the age of six, told the Sadler Commission in 1832 that the conditions were 'so dusty, the dust got up my lungs, and the work was so hard. I got so bad in health, that when I pulled the baskets down, I pulled my bones out of their places'.² Such evidence provides valuable snapshots of particular industries at particular times, albeit mediated through the lens of metropolitan middle-class male officials intent on exposing the worst abuses of the system in order to justify state intervention.

Household budgets detailing the earnings and expenditure of working-class families yield up information over longer time spans. These budgets were used to good effect by Jane Humphries in her earlier work.³ But they are limited in number and patchy in their geographical and occupational coverage.

Not surprisingly then, there is a...